Evolution of fatherhood: From good to better

It is appropriate that in the month in which we celebrate fathers, the pop culture world should bring us a little art movie called In the Family.

Lauded by critics as the most engaging film you’ll probably never see, the premise is very now. In the American heartland, a widowed father with a six-year-old son named Cody recovers from the loss of his wife and finds a new love, who happens to not only be Asian, but a man. Cody loves his new dad, and things are good for the reconstituted family until the widower is killed in a car crash, and an ugly custody battle ensues. It’s a movie subtly infused with the issues of gay marriage, race, sexuality and, most of all, the evolution of the family unit.

In short, a perfect reflection of what it means to be a modern-day father.

Which is to say, not easy. Not that it ever has been, whether pop was a foraging Stone Age caveman or a Middle Ages crusader or a hard-working pioneer farmer or a nattily suited Mad Men-era insurance salesman or a 21st-century gay man embracing parenthood.

You don’t need to be a dad to know that being a dad has always been a tricky — and morphing — business, one-part anthropological imperative, one part cultural pressure, and all parts responsibility.

One need only backtrack a half­-century for a prime example of the ongoing seismic shift, to a simpler time when Father Knows Best and My Three Sons depicted the singular pursuit of the average middle-class dad. Go to work, support the family, pace outside the delivery room, remain mostly removed from child-rearing and child-nurturing, load up the station wagon for the annual summer vacation, and tell the wife how pretty she is on the way to the neighbour’s cocktail party. Everything else? Pretty much left to the stay-at-home mom.

And then along came Gloria Steinem and a demographic quake so profound that all gender-defining bets were off the kitchen table. Women began to control their own sexuality. They joined the workforce by the millions. They supported themselves, often without benefit of a spouse. They were marrying, and having children, much later in life, and they often ended up raising their sons and daughters in no-dad households.

Suddenly dads, and future dads, found themselves stripped of their historical identity, no longer always the chief breadwinner, but quickstepping to the beat of a bewildering relationship where both spouses earned a paycheque and where he was expected to shoulder his share of the child-rearing, including the 3 a.m. diaper change and the household chores, while still being the manly man.

Like any cultural shift, the change in modern-day fatherhood has been well-documented and dissected. Talk shows, newspaper articles, magazine essays, websites and, of course, mountains of books have been dedicated to the new dad and what it means to father in a world where the ground has suddenly shifted beneath your feet, when the biological versus emotional imperatives that once defined fatherhood have morphed into a battle between embracing your feminine side without sacrificing the societal expectations that come with ownership of the Y chromosome.

Not surprisingly, it has been a somewhat rocky road for fathers caught in the modern-day vortex.

Pop culture, as is often the case, has been especially unkind to fathers, often depicting them as deadbeat buffoons who don’t know what’s going on in their own homes, who can’t handle a screwdriver, who desert their children, who let their offspring disrespectfully treat them like walking ATMs, whose wives are dismissive and sarcastic about everything from their sexual prowess to their earning skills.

The reality is somewhat more heartening. Having come through the revolution, today’s dads are much more involved with their children. Paternity leave has become a workplace standard, and the new hands-on fatherhood starts with cutting the umbilical cord in the delivery room.

Dads today, like moms, are rewriting the history of what it means to parent. No longer is it jarring to see a dad in the playground, or escorting junior to school or swimming lessons, or walking down the street with a newborn strapped to his chest in a Snugli. No more is the phrase “stay-at-home dad” considered a cultural anomaly, and many dads today aren’t just bringing home the bacon, they’re cooking it, too.

And perhaps to make up for lost time, grandfathers are also getting in on the act, often spending far more time with their grandchildren than they ever would, or could, with their own children.

The evolution will continue, of course, as each new generation defines what it means to be a father. The good news is that the kids are the lucky beneficiaries of all this new-found emancipation, and that’s all that really matters.

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